The Land Beyond The Land Beyond

If Suburbanites, As Predicted, Head For Smallville, What Will They Head For?

August 20, 1987|By Jim Spencer.

In Aug. 6, 1910, Otis Crandall and Emma Stack were front-page news in Goodland, Ind. Sportswriters in New York were comparing Crandall, the ``boy wonder from Indiana`` then pitching for the New York Giants, to the great Christy Mathewson, the Goodland Herald reported that day. ``If Rube Marquard

(another Giant pitcher) had Crandall`s temperament--or rather lack of it,``

a Herald writer opined, ``he would make all previous strikeout records appear like perforated nickels.``

Having presented that splendid simile to posterity, the paper went on to note--in a separate item on Page 1--that ``Miss Emma Stack went to Chicago Thursday morning.``

Seventy-seven years ago, traveling to the city from Goodland, Kentland, Brook, Morocco, Enos or any of the other burgs that make up Newton County, Ind., was a big deal. Now, a business consultant and retired professor of real estate and urban development has made a noteworthy prediction about traffic in the other direction.

Extrapolating from a four-year, nationwide analysis of population data into a gut instinct about what Americans want out of life, Jack Lessinger, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington-Seattle, has officially dubbed Newton County the premier ``region of opportunity`` in all of the extended Chicago area. That includes such red-hot growth corridors as Du Page, Kane, McHenry, Will and Lake Counties in Illinois, as well as vast areas of southern Wisconsin and northern Indiana. These well-known areas will continue to develop, but, Lessinger says, the land prices in them are already inflated, and they are already too crowded.

In his mind`s eye, Lessinger has seen the future, and it is a flat, skinny stretch of cornfields, state parks and swamps running about 40 miles along the western edge of Indiana, from the Kankakee River on the north to Kentland, the county seat, on the south. Right now the area is populated primarily by farmers, nudists and an occasional Mafia corpse, but in the coming decades it will be, Lessinger says, a core of ``penturbia,`` the term Lessinger made up to describe where people in this country will end up after abandoning the suburbs.

``Look for penturbia beyond the normal commuting range of the nation`s central cities,`` Lessinger wrote recently in American Demographics magazine. ``It is small cities and towns, new subdivisions, homesteads, industrial and commercial districts interspersed with farms, forests, rivers and lakes.`` Riding down U.S. Hwy. 41, which more or less bisects Newton County, past the King of the Road truckstop and Art`s Motel, a quaint stone structure with a total of eight rooms, you can see the landscape Lessinger describes but not the people.

He has predicted similarly unlikely growth belts far from most of America`s major cities. For example, Lessinger finds only three penturban counties in the entire state of California--among them Imperial County, which sits in the far southeastern corner of the state, hundreds of miles from Los Angeles. Around New York City, the states of Connecticut and New Jersey have no penturban potential, Lessinger concludes.

This may sound stange, but having published one book on the subject,

``Regions of Opportunity,`` Lessinger is hard at work on a sequel titled

``Penturbia,`` which he believes will solidify his theory.

For the last three decades, he says, America`s ``little kings`` ruled over three-bedroom, two-bath castles on cul de sacs and bought designer jeans and gas grills with the zeal of Tammy Faye Bakker at a Revlon sale. Now, he insists, these miniature monarchs are beginning to turn their backs on conspicuous consumption and migrate once again, this time to ``small towns and their surrounding areas.``

There, they will become ``caring conservers,`` another piece of nomenclature coined by Lessinger to explain his theory.

``Caring conservers save and guard their resources,`` Lessinger wrote in American Demographics. ``They do this by law, by propaganda and by appeal to conscience. The will to conserve extends to savings, investments, energy, clean air and water. It extends to cultural artifacts like historic buildings, parks, all forms of art and people. Caring conservers see women, minorities, the elderly and the handicapped as underused resources.``

``Penturbia is a different kind of society,`` explains Lessinger, who, despite his theory, still lives in Seattle. ``It is part of a whole new economy, a whole new set of attitudes. Part of it will be to trade salaries for quality of life. People will live simpler lives and rely on getting what they want from the scenery and their neighbors.``

For the summer at least, Tom Schmidt`s neighbors at the Ponderosa Sun Club have stripped away the encumbrances of modern metropolitan life, not to mention their clothes. Here, in the woods near Roselawn in the northern end of Newton County, the scenery includes a stunning blond showering naked beside a swimming pool and a fellow playing tennis clad only in a pair of sneakers.